I have a "hunch" that the value per btc will shortly be back to under 10$. Pools will just keep getting bigger and continue mining no matter how high the difficulty level gets. Solo miners will eventually be leftwith two choices, either to join a pool or to drop their rigs and sell them. mining at 1.6ghs with todays difficulty level gets me roughly 1.8 bitcoins per 24 hours. the difficulty went from 500K give or take to 800K give or take and the difference in coins was roughly .3 of a bitcoin per 24 hours. I was making 2.1 bitcoins per 24 hours, now i am making 1.8 bitcoins.

Many people will never stop mining. They live with their parents and don't pay for power, or stash the rigs at work and hope no one notices. And then come the FPGAs, which achieve a hash per watt rate that no graphics card can ever match. If BTC falls below $10 (and I think it will) the difficulty rate will still go up next week, and afterwards.

This all makes me think about returning all the hardware back to store - here in Russia we have 2 weeks grace period where we can return stuff to the store even if there is no issues with it..

Jeez, the idea of making thousands of dollars by just setting up a computer with a few video cards has even made it to as far as russia.

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

My humble prediction is that it'll plummet to sub $10 in the very near future. Once below 10, the floodgates will open and a lot of panicking people will want to cash in, driving the value even lower (exactly what we're seeing now, just on a grander scale). Wether there's gonna be a dead cat bounce or not, hard to tell.

$10 would be a reasonable return, or possible a little below. This is the value that BTC had before the MASSIVE price pump that occured (most likely from someone with large capital to invest in what people are calling a 'pump and dump'). It will probably dip below 10 as people panic and panic and sell and sell. If bitcoin can survive the runoff, then it will likely return to around $10 and difficulty will drop from its crazy current levels as the people who bought during the $30 / 500k difficulty point return their hardware to stores in droves.

Really? Like you guys weren't here last month? It was 8USD flat when I first started and that was last week of May.

Oh we were. The key difference now is that it takes almost 4 times more electricity and 4 times more time to generate a bitcoin. If the price now reaches parity with late May, would you say everything is fine or that there is a problem?

At the current difficulty will be very hard to see bitcoins under $10, with the next jump it will be impossible.

1. Difficulty doesn't determine price. 2. If the network continues growing (and it will since there is still profit to be had) mining revenue will soon approach electricity cost. Everyone will want to dump their hardware and bitcoins to get out of this unprofitable business which will drive the cost lower. Not a prediction, just a counter-scenario to what you describe is "impossible". This could be theoretically countered by an influx of new money seeking to buy bitcoins, but I'm not sure what would cause that since most of the attention Bitcoin has been getting has been negative.

I think the harder mining gets, the higher the value of BitCoins is going to rise.. I don't think it'll go back down to single digits unless theres something can threaten the bitcoin economy.

There is no bitcoin economy. Only speculation that there might be one later on.

As mining stops growing in the next 2-3 months, the influx of miners will slow. Miners are a huge part of the new money and attention coming into bitcoin, and that's a big part of what has caused price rises. Thus the price jumps could potentially stabilize. At that point the growth will go back to being very slow as bitcoin tries to establish a role for itself in the world. If it stops growing it will devalue because it's not big enough as an economy to sustain itself. There are plenty of bitcoins in existence right now. More than anyone could need. You can't sell them all for the current market price, no one would want that many because you can't really do much with them.